Larry Kart

Eckstine is in great shape on the Eckstine/Basie album.

Wait. I do know that Joseph was claustrophobic, and once he settled in Staten Island he basically couldn't leave because of fear of entering the tunnel to Manhattan.

No. Please tell us if you do know.

So who would hire Don Joseph to play a Bar Mitzvah?

I know nothing one way or the other about Joseph the person, only about Joseph the player.

Leave us not forget Fruscella's like-minded friend Don Joseph. He left behind a fine album on Uptown, lovely solos on Chuck Wayne's "String Fever" and a gorgeous passage on Gerry Muligan's no less gorgeous big band arrangement of "All the Things You Are."

"I Can't Get Started" from the Lee Konitz/Paul Bley album "Out of Nowhere" (Steeplechase) 1997. In fact just about every track on this one is a jaw dropper, with Bley at his most brilliantly eccentric and Lee hitting every Bley curve ball, changeup, knuckleball, even a few beanballs right on the nose in an inspired manner. What a day in the studio this must have been.

The Playboy Jazz Fest performances on "Blowin' Up a Breeze" are fabulous.

Anyone dig altoist Loren Stallman? I find him interesting, like his tone and fluidity.

A Jazz Vespers thing. Hip church.

Anyone here dig pianist/composer Luis Perdomo?. I caught him a few yers ago at a church service in Manhattan, and have since acquired several of his CDs. At least two of them include tenor man Mark Shim, a big plus for me. From Venezuela, Perdomo has his own forceful thing and interacts well with the late Ralph Peterson Jr.

Good one.👍

Posted the other day about drummer Clarence Penn's album "Play-Penn," which I liked but still felt something was a bit missing. Today I cranked up the volume a good deal and the whole thing came alive. Odd experience because I've always found Criss Cross recording to sound alike volume wise.

Crow documentary is a delight.

The Hi-Hat was in Boston, no?

Got it mostly because I wanted more Swana than I already had. Good album, but I wish Van Ruller had been replaced by a pianist whose comping reinforced Penn's drum work -- like Orrin Evans for example.

Moose Charlap was the chief recording session contractor on the NYC scene in the '50s and '60s. He also wrote the songs for "Peter Pan."

Good guess. Also Quincy himself later on married one of those young girls, actress Peggy Lipton. Didn't seem to hold him back in the business. O Tempera, O Mores. Peggy Lipton

OK -- I now think that it all comes down to that photo with that adoring girl, which likely stands for a fair sized wave of behavior/sentiment among young female fans of that age. Based on the look of the photo, I'd bet that it appeared in Life or Look magazine, magazines that had large circulations back then. And who knows what broad-based fears, conscious or not, were set off among the various social structures that existed in America at that time by that photo and the likely fact of the intensity and nature of Eckstine's young white female fandom that the photo vividly spoke of. How much of a reaction of this sort would it have taken to more or less casually or even specifically lead to the "erasue" Eckstine I don't know. It would be good to have some "inside the entertainment industry" testimony on this, if there is any that can be found. But this is the best explanation I can think of.

Could it be, Jim, that for those programmers Eckstine was a bit too much of the past, that his quite considerable heyday was felt to speak of a prior era?

Was listening to Don Menza's "Live at Carmello's,' with Noto, Nistico, Strazzeri, Shelly Manne, Menza on baritone and alto, not tenor, and Andy Simpkins, and I was struck by in what fine form Noto was -- ideas, chops, everything. At times he even sounds like Dizzy. And I sure do like Strazzeri as a comper and soloist. Only drawback is that Simpkins is too prominent in the mix IMO.

Excellent performance, but what or whose much less compelling "manipulative drama" do you have in mind as a point of comparison? BTW that photo of Eckstine with that blond girl burying her curls in his shoulder is something else. A gemlike point in time.

"Overwhelming" as in really intense in its musical and emotional impact. Stop trying to paint me as saying things I didn't and wouldn't say. "Intimidating"? Where have I ever implied anything like that? Geez -- I said "noble." Noble and intimidating? Maybe El Cid.

Jim: The voice is beautifully knit together on "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," but then on this song at that pace, it needs to be. Indeed, there are a number of points, beginning with his initial "They," when the sheer intensity of Eckstine's timbre is at once noble, overwhelming, and sensual as all get out. But a good deal of taut force is being exerted by him -- this is not particularly easeful singing, nor in emotional/dramatic terms should it be -- and when with time things begin to loosen up in the vocal apparatus, there's little room in the overall conception for stepping back/dialing down.

I, for one, am not trying to "erase" anyone, and I resent the kind of "1619 Project" use of the term. For me it's just a matter of the vocal artist at hand and how or her or she handles the vicissitudes of the aging process. For example, I've rarely been bothered by Billie Holiday's vocal problems because the wholeness of Holiday's artistic/dramatic persona leaves room for them, so to speak -- they're like the changing colors of a tree leaf in autumn. Mr. B, by comparison, strikes me as essentially a romantic crooner, and while there's nothing wrong in my book about that profile per se, when the croon develops a wobble, there is.